Desperate Remedies

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DESPERATE REMEDIES



CONTENTS

PREFATORY NOTE
I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS
II. THE EVENTS OF A FORTNIGHT
III. THE EVENTS OF EIGHT DAYS
IV. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
V. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
VI. THE EVENTS OF TWELVE HOURS
VII. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
VIII. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN DAYS
IX. THE EVENTS OF TEN WEEKS
X. THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
XI. THE EVENTS OF FIVE DAYS
XII. THE EVENTS OF TEN MONTHS
XIII. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
XIV. THE EVENTS OF FIVE WEEKS
XV. THE EVENTS OF THREE WEEKS
XVI. THE EVENTS OF ONE WEEK
XVII. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
XVIII. THE EVENTS OF THREE DAYS
XIX. THE EVENTS OF A DAY AND NIGHT
XX. THE EVENTS OF THREE HOURS
XXI. THE EVENTS OF EIGHTEEN HOURS
SEQUEL



PREFATORY NOTE

The following story, the first published by the author, was written
nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a
method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt,
too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and
moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest; but some of
the scenes, and at least one of the characters, have been deemed not
unworthy of a little longer preservation; and as they could hardly
be reproduced in a fragmentary form the novel is reissued complete
--the more readily that it has for some considerable time been
reprinted and widely circulated in America.
January 1889.

To the foregoing note I have only to add that, in the present
edition of 'Desperate Remedies,' some Wessex towns and other places
that are common to the scenes of several of these stories have been
called for the first time by the names under which they appear
elsewhere, for the satisfaction of any reader who may care for
consistency in such matters.

This is the only material change; for, as it happened that certain
characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story
were present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no
French name for them it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered.

T.H.
February 1896.



I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS

1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36

In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the
issue was a Christmas visit.

In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect
who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland
town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to
spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury.
They had gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after
graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought
which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature,
picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule,
broadcast, it was all three.

Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover
evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional
experience: to him it was ever a surprise.

While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived
in a street not far from Russell Square. Though they were in no
more than comfortable circumstances, the captain's wife came of an
ancient family whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of
the most illustrious and well-known in the kingdom.

The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most
beautiful and queenly being he had ever beheld. She was about
nineteen or twenty, and her name was Cytherea. In truth she was not
so very unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one
respect. She was perfect in her manner and bearing, and they were
not. A mere distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, is
often read as the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him
no less than perfection throughout--transcending her rural rivals in
very nature. Graye did a thing the blissfulness of which was only
eclipsed by its hazardousness. He loved her at first sight.

His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her
parents two or three times on the first week of his arrival in
London, and accident and a lover's contrivance brought them together
as frequently the week following. The parents liked young Graye,
and having few friends (for their equals in blood were their
superiors in position), he was received on very generous terms. His
passion for Cytherea grew not only strong, but ineffably exalted:
she, without positively encouraging him, tacitly assented to his
schemes for being near her. Her father and mother seemed to have
lost all confidence in nobility of birth, without money to give
effect to its presence, and looked upon the budding consequence of
the young people's reciprocal glances with placidity, if not actual
favour.

Graye's whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and
unaccountable episode. After passing through three weeks of sweet
experience, he had arrived at the last stage--a kind of moral Gaza
--before plunging into an emotional desert. The second week in
January had come round, and it was necessary for the young architect
to leave town.

Throughout his acquaintanceship with the lady of his heart there had
been this marked peculiarity in her love: she had delighted in his
presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last she had
repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which
drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural
tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The
present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually,
even if love is in itself an end, it must be regarded as a beginning
to be enjoyed.

In spite of evasions as an obstacle, and in consequence of them as a
spur, he would put the matter off no longer. It was evening. He
took her into a little conservatory on the landing, and there among
the evergreens, by the light of a few tiny lamps, infinitely
enhancing the freshness and beauty of the leaves, he made the
declaration of a love as fresh and beautiful as they.

'My love--my darling, be my wife!'

She seemed like one just awakened. 'Ah--we must part now!' she
faltered, in a voice of anguish. 'I will write to you.' She
loosened her hand and rushed away.

In a wild fever Graye went home and watched for the next morning.
Who shall express his misery and wonder when a note containing these
words was put into his hand?

'Good-bye; good-bye for ever. As recognized lovers something
divides us eternally. Forgive me--I should have told you before;
but your love was sweet! Never mention me.'

That very day, and as it seemed, to put an end to a painful
condition of things, daughter and parents left London to pay off a
promised visit to a relative in a western county. No message or
letter of entreaty could wring from her any explanation. She begged
him not to follow her, and the most bewildering point was that her
father and mother appeared, from the tone of a letter Graye received
from them, as vexed and sad as he at this sudden renunciation. One
thing was plain: without admitting her reason as valid, they knew
what that reason was, and did not intend to reveal it.

A week from that day Ambrose Graye left his friend Huntway's house
and saw no more of the Love he mourned. From time to time his
friend answered any inquiry Graye made by letter respecting her.
But very poor food to a lover is intelligence of a mistress filtered
through a friend. Huntway could tell nothing definitely. He said
he believed there had been some prior flirtation between Cytherea
and her cousin, an officer of the line, two or three years before
Graye met her, which had suddenly been terminated by the cousin's
departure for India, and the young lady's travelling on the
Continent with her parents the whole of the ensuing summer, on
account of delicate health. Eventually Huntway said that
circumstances had rendered Graye's attachment more hopeless still.
Cytherea's mother had unexpectedly inherited a large fortune and
estates in the west of England by the rapid fall of some intervening
lives. This had caused their removal from the small house in
Bloomsbury, and, as it appeared, a renunciation of their old friends
in that quarter.

Young Graye concluded that his Cytherea had forgotten him and his
love. But he could not forget her.

2. FROM 1843 TO 1861

Eight years later, feeling lonely and depressed--a man without
relatives, with many acquaintances but no friends--Ambrose Graye met
a young lady of a different kind, fairly endowed with money and good
gifts. As to caring very deeply for another woman after the loss of
Cytherea, it was an absolute impossibility with him. With all, the
beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude
pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special
event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.

This second young lady and Graye were married. That he did not,
first or last, love his wife as he should have done, was known to
all; but few knew that his unmanageable heart could never be weaned
from useless repining at the loss of its first idol.

His character to some extent deteriorated, as emotional
constitutions will under the long sense of disappointment at having
missed their imagined destiny. And thus, though naturally of a
gentle and pleasant disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly
regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those
persons to be. The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early
life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not
picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of
indescribable depression. The practical issue of such a condition
was improvidence, originally almost an unconscious improvidence, for
every debt incurred had been mentally paid off with a religious
exactness from the treasures of expectation before mentioned. But
as years revolved, the same course was continued from the lack of
spirit sufficient for shifting out of an old groove when it has been
found to lead to disaster.

In the year 1861 his wife died, leaving him a widower with two
children. The elder, a son named Owen, now just turned seventeen,
was taken from school, and initiated as pupil to the profession of
architect in his father's office. The remaining child was a
daughter, and Owen's junior by a year.

Her christian name was Cytherea, and it is easy to guess why.

3. OCTOBER THE TWELFTH, 1863

We pass over two years in order to reach the next cardinal event of
these persons' lives. The scene is still the Grayes' native town of
Hocbridge, but as it appeared on a Monday afternoon in the month of
October.

The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be
seen wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account
of the time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the
practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long
shadows and enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any
perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing
tones which grace its decline. Next, it was that stage in the
progress of the week when business--which, carried on under the
gables of an old country place, is not devoid of a romantic sparkle
--was well-nigh extinguished. Lastly, the town was intentionally
bent upon being attractive by exhibiting to an influx of visitors
the local talent for dramatic recitation, and provincial towns
trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.

Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they
interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities
unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they
attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce
disagreeable caricatures which spoil them.

The weather-stained clock-face in the low church tower standing at
the intersection of the three chief streets was expressing half-past
two to the Town Hall opposite, where the much talked-of reading from
Shakespeare was about to begin. The doors were open, and those
persons who had already assembled within the building were noticing
the entrance of the new-comers--silently criticizing their dress
--questioning the genuineness of their teeth and hair--estimating
their private means.

Among these later ones came an exceptional young maiden who glowed
amid the dulness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown
stubble. She wore an elegant dark jacket, lavender dress, hat with
grey strings and trimmings, and gloves of a colour to harmonize.
She lightly walked up the side passage of the room, cast a slight
glance around, and entered the seat pointed out to her.

The young girl was Cytherea Graye; her age was now about eighteen.
During her entry, and at various times whilst sitting in her seat
and listening to the reader on the platform, her personal appearance
formed an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring
eyes.

Her face was exceedingly attractive, though artistically less
perfect than her figure, which approached unusually near to the
standard of faultlessness. But even this feature of hers yielded
the palm to the gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating
and delightful to an extreme degree.

Indeed, motion was her speciality, whether shown on its most
extended scale of bodily progression, or minutely, as in the
uplifting of her eyelids, the bending of her fingers, the pouting of
her lip. The carriage of her head--motion within motion--a glide
upon a glide--was as delicate as that of a magnetic needle. And
this flexibility and elasticity had never been taught her by rule,
nor even been acquired by observation, but, nullo cultu, had
naturally developed itself with her years. In childhood, a stone or
stalk in the way, which had been the inevitable occasion of a fall
to her playmates, had usually left her safe and upright on her feet
after the narrowest escape by oscillations and whirls for the
preservation of her balance. At mixed Christmas parties, when she
numbered but twelve or thirteen years, and was heartily despised on
that account by lads who deemed themselves men, her apt lightness in
the dance covered this incompleteness in her womanhood, and
compelled the self-same youths in spite of resolutions to seize upon
her childish figure as a partner whom they could not afford to
contemn. And in later years, when the instincts of her sex had
shown her this point as the best and rarest feature in her external
self, she was not found wanting in attention to the cultivation of
finish in its details.

Her hair rested gaily upon her shoulders in curls and was of a
shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite
nut-brown as each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of a
sapphire hue, though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears;
they possessed the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and
good faith as distinguishable from that harder brightness which
seems to express faithfulness only to the object confronting them.

But to attempt to gain a view of her--or indeed of any fascinating
woman--from a measured category, is as difficult as to appreciate
the effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern
--or of a full chord of music by piping the notes in succession.
Nevertheless it may readily be believed from the description here
ventured, that among the many winning phases of her aspect, these
were particularly striking:--

During pleasant doubt, when her eyes brightened stealthily and
smiled (as eyes will smile) as distinctly as her lips, and in the
space of a single instant expressed clearly the whole round of
degrees of expectancy which lie over the wide expanse between Yea
and Nay.

During the telling of a secret, which was involuntarily
accompanied by a sudden minute start, and ecstatic pressure of
the listener's arm, side, or neck, as the position and degree
of intimacy dictated.

When anxiously regarding one who possessed her affections.

She suddenly assumed the last-mentioned bearing in the progress of
the present entertainment. Her glance was directed out of the
window.

Why the particulars of a young lady's presence at a very mediocre
performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion which
their intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why
they were remembered and individualized by herself and others
through after years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it
were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in
which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It
was the last hour of experience she ever enjoyed with a mind
entirely free from a knowledge of that labyrinth into which she
stepped immediately afterwards--to continue a perplexed course along
its mazes for the greater portion of twenty-nine subsequent months.

The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone,
and through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of
the room the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also
the upper part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of
completion under the superintendence of Miss Graye's father, the
architect to the work.

That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in
the room was a fact which Cytherea's idling eyes had discovered with
some interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that
was being enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical
stonework rose a cage of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon
this stood five men--four in clothes as white as the new erection
close beneath their hands, the fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a
gentleman.

The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's
labourer. The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been
giving directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow
footway allowed, stood perfectly still.

The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was
curious and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by
the dark margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which
emphasized by contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.

The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and
the five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere
and experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared little
larger than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft,
spirit-like silentness. One idea above all others was conveyed to
the mind of a person on the ground by their aspect, namely,
concentration of purpose: that they were indifferent to--even
unconscious of--the distracted world beneath them, and all that
moved upon it. They never looked off the scaffolding.

Then one of them turned; it was Mr. Graye. Again he stood
motionless, with attention to the operations of the others. He
appeared to be lost in reflection, and had directed his face towards
a new stone they were lifting.

'Why does he stand like that?' the young lady thought at length--up
to that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient
Tarentines, who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the
Theatre the entry into their Harbour of a power that overturned the
State.

She moved herself uneasily. 'I wish he would come down,' she
whispered, still gazing at the skybacked picture. 'It is so
dangerous to be absent-minded up there.'

When she had done murmuring the words her father indecisively laid
hold of one of the scaffold-poles, as if to test its strength, then
let it go and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An
instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the
air, immediately disappearing downwards.

His agonized daughter rose to her feet by a convulsive movement.
Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no
sound. One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had
happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible
upon their faces at the sight of the poor child. A moment longer,
and she fell to the floor.

The next impression of which Cytherea had any consciousness was of
being carried from a strange vehicle across the pavement to the
steps of her own house by her brother and an older man. Recollection
of what had passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they
entered the door--through which another and sadder burden had been
carried but a few instants before--her eyes caught sight of the
south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining
in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will
attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous--however foreign
in essence these scenes may be--as chemical waters will crystallize
on twigs and wires. Even after that time any mental agony brought
less vividly to Cytherea's mind the scene from the Town Hall windows
than sunlight streaming in shaft-like lines.

4. OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH

When death enters a house, an element of sadness and an element of
horror accompany it. Sadness, from the death itself: horror, from
the clouds of blackness we designedly labour to introduce.

The funeral had taken place. Depressed, yet resolved in his
demeanour, Owen Graye sat before his father's private escritoire,
engaged in turning out and unfolding a heterogeneous collection of
papers--forbidding and inharmonious to the eye at all times--most of
all to one under the influence of a great grief. Laminae of white
paper tied with twine were indiscriminately intermixed with other
white papers bounded by black edges--these with blue foolscap
wrapped round with crude red tape.

The bulk of these letters, bills, and other documents were submitted
to a careful examination, by which the appended particulars were
ascertained:--

First, that their father's income from professional sources had
been very small, amounting to not more than half their expenditure;
and that his own and his wife's property, upon which he had relied
for the balance, had been sunk and lost in unwise loans to
unscrupulous men, who had traded upon their father's too
open-hearted trustfulness.

Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavoured to regain
his standing by the illusory path of speculation. The most notable
instance of this was the following. He had been induced, when at
Plymouth in the autumn of the previous year, to venture all his
spare capital on the bottomry security of an Italian brig which
had put into the harbour in distress. The profit was to be
considerable, so was the risk. There turned out to be no security
whatever. The circumstances of the case tendered it the most
unfortunate speculation that a man like himself--ignorant of all
such matters--could possibly engage in. The vessel went down, and
all Mr. Graye's money with it.

Third, that these failures had left him burdened with debts he
knew not how to meet; so that at the time of his death even the few
pounds lying to his account at the bank were his only in name.

Fourth, that the loss of his wife two years earlier had
awakened him to a keen sense of his blindness, and of his duty by
his children. He had then resolved to reinstate by unflagging zeal
in the pursuit of his profession, and by no speculation, at least a
portion of the little fortune he had let go.

Cytherea was frequently at her brother's elbow during these
examinations. She often remarked sadly--

'Poor papa failed to fulfil his good intention for want of time,
didn't he, Owen? And there was an excuse for his past, though he
never would claim it. I never forget that original disheartening
blow, and how that from it sprang all the ills of his life
--everything connected with his gloom, and the lassitude in
business we used so often to see about him.'

'I remember what he said once,' returned the brother, 'when I sat up
late with him. He said, "Owen, don't love too blindly: blindly you
will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to
a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not
mine," father said. "Cultivate the art of renunciation." And I am
going to, Cytherea.'

'And once mamma said that an excellent woman was papa's ruin,
because he did not know the way to give her up when he had lost her.
I wonder where she is now, Owen? We were told not to try to find
out anything about her. Papa never told us her name, did he?'

'That was by her own request, I believe. But never mind her; she
was not our mother.'

The love affair which had been Ambrose Graye's disheartening blow
was precisely of that nature which lads take little account of, but
girls ponder in their hearts.

5. FROM OCTOBER THE NINETEENTH TO JULY THE NINTH

Thus Ambrose Graye's good intentions with regard to the
reintegration of his property had scarcely taken tangible form
when his sudden death put them for ever out of his power.